Graphic:history of election results

No prime minister has ever recovered from as bad a set of local election results as Labour had on Thursday and won the subsequent general election. Gordon Brown has very few options, apart from waiting, and hoping, unless he wants to undermine his hard-won reputation for prudence and long-term stability.

Often, with local elections, there are ifs and buts. Not this time. The Tories did very well. A 44 per cent estimated national share of the vote in these elections, exceeded their hopes and compared with 42, 46 and 43 per cent in the last three Labour years in opposition.

Labour’s results were unreservedly poor, even leaving aside the London mayor’s race. Labour’s vote share of 24 per cent is its lowest, and narrowly the lowest for any governing party since this figure was first calculated in the early 1980s. (This BBC estimate is based on votes cast in more than 900 wards in 50 councils.)

The Liberal Democrats’ vote share of 25 per cent is its lowest since 1998 but the party won seats from Labour in several key battlegrounds in northern cities. One silver lining is that the highly publicised, and close, contest in London resulted in a sharp rise in turnout, a vindication of directly elected mayors.

The result is the worst for Labour since its rout in 1968, when it was wiped out in London by much more than on Thursday. The next two comparable local defeats are 1977 for Labour and 1995 for the Tories, when the governing parties did very badly. None of these parallels is of any comfort to Mr Brown and Labour. Despite partial recoveries from these mid-term defeats, the Government lost the next general elections, in 1970, 1979 and 1997 by decisive margins.

It is only a partly a question of numbers, and extrapolations of precise results to general elections are usually misleading. It is more about political authority. Once lost, it is very hard to recover. In 1968 Harold Wilson had been tarnished by the devaluation six months earlier. In 1977 the Callaghan Government had just been through the horrors of the sterling and International Monetary Fund loan crisis of 1976. In each case, later revivals were very limited and weak. In 1995 the Tories were riven by infighting over Europe and were unpopular because of tax increases. After the local elections, John Major triggered a leadership contest. He won, but earned only the briefest of respites.

Mr Brown and his fellow ministers sensibly did not try to minimise the scale of Labour’s defeat, nor pretend it was just a mid-term setback. But there is little they can do. There is no threat to Mr Brown’s position. A Cabinet reshuffle is unlikely this month. It would smack of panic, as Tony Blair’s final one in May 2006 did, and there is no evidence that shifting ministers around makes any impact on voters. The reasons for Thursday’s rout were succinctly put by Ed Balls on the Radio 4 World at One programme: “People are worried about the state of the economy, but on the doorstep they have also been cross with us. They think their tax bills are going up, their fuel prices are going up, their utility bills are going up, and they want to know that we’re doing more to help them though difficult times and we’re on their side.”

There were massive Labour abstentions, as in 1968 and 1977, on white working-class estates, where the Liberal Democrats, and in a few places the British National Party, made inroads.

But there is little the Government can do directly, apart from hoping that the economic slowdown will not last too long. Not only is it very hard to identify the precise losers from the 10p tax change, but any compensation could be very costly. The same applies on fuel and utility prices. Help is not cheap. Labour MPs are already saying that the Government must do more for “our” people, the low paid – notably by raising the starting threshold for income tax, the best way to deal with the 10p problem, and relaxing the tight limits on public sector pay. But such moves risk boosting public borrowing just when it is already too high and should be reined in.

There is the real danger of profligacy before a 2010 election and a mighty hangover for whichever party is in government afterwards. That presents a challenge for David Cameron and George Osborne. They are right to celebrate the Tories’ advances but they are operating within tight constraints. The deterioraton in the economy and public finances means that the Tories have to be more cautious to be credible.

Times Recommends

• Oh no, Mr Darling: you have failed
• BBC survives dogfight over Kennel Club expose
• Where the Rosetta belongs can’t be set in stone